Jan 23/24 Meteors

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After almost a week of clouds and rain, it was once again clear enough for meteor watching last night. The much publicized series of strong winter storms did not disappoint with many reports of tornadoes, hurricane force winds, and heavy rain across much of the American Southwest. The 4th of the 5 storms, which passed through Arizona Thursday night, broke records across much of Arizona for lowest recorded barometric pressure.

Here in Tucson, the story was the much needed rain. Approximately 2.3″ of rain fell at my house. A few more good rain-soakers this winter would go a long way towards alleviating our decade long drought. Go El Nino…

For the past month I’ve had 3 cameras set up (my 2 small FOV cameras and an all-sky fireball camera). The all-sky camera was located on the roof of my house and was only held in place by a few bricks. Since winds were forecast to be so high last week, I decided to take the camera down. While on the roof I took a peak at my other 2 cameras and found that the glass window of one of the all-weather housing was loose. In fact, it was almost completely debonded from the metal housing and resting on the camera’s lens. If I hadn’t noticed this, I’d probably be dealing with one thoroughly soaked (and probably dead) camera and lens. So for the next few nights only the zenith pointing meteor camera will be operating.

Sporadic activity remains healthy. Then again with only 2 very minor showers active, most meteors are sporadics. We are nearing the end of activity for the December Leonis Minorids which have been producing about 10-20% of all meteor activity since mid-December (with the exception of a few nights around the Geminid and Quadrantid maximums).